Sudan president Omar al-Bashir: A host to terrorists who rules Darfur with an iron fist

In his whitewashed palace beside the Nile, President Omar al-Bashir has ruled
Sudan with consummate guile and ruthlessness for almost two decades.

By David Blair, Diplomatic Editor

3:19PM BST 14 Jul 2008

A dour, heavily-built soldier, notable for his lack of charisma, General Bashir rose through the army and fought alongside Egyptian forces in the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

He overthrew an elected government in Sudan to seize power in a military coup in 1989. With his purely military background and lack of political experience, Mr Bashir was widely seen as a puppet of Sudan's Islamist extremists.

For his first decade in power, he ruled in alliance with Hassan al-Turabi, Sudan's leading Islamist ideologue. Mr Bashir duly turned Khartoum into a haven for anti-Western radicals.

Carlos the Jackal, the nihilist terrorist, lived there for three years until his abduction by French intelligence. Mr Bashir armed and trained ruthless Ugandan rebels, led by so-called prophet Joseph Kony and styling themselves the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who specialised in abducting children and turning them into killers.

Most notoriously of all, Mr Bashir hosted Osama bin Laden in Khartoum between 1992 and 1996.

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But Mr Bashir was never animated by Islamic zeal or ideological fervour. All he wanted was to hold power. In particular, he wanted to ensure that the Nile Valley's Arab tribes, who had ruled Sudan since independence from Britain in 1956, kept their monopoly of wealth and influence.

When he grasped that Sudan's pariah status threatened this position, Mr Bashir was quick to adapt. He purged Mr Turabi in 1999, ended Khartoum's support for the LRA and concluded a peace deal with black African rebels from southern Sudan, who had waged an insurgency for decades.

When rebels in Darfur began a separate war in 2003, however, Mr Bashir sensed a new threat to his grip on power. His response was draconian. By arming and training brutal Arab militias, he hoped to secure his position by inflicting terrible punishment on the tribes who had provided the insurgents.

In the short term, Mr Bashir, 64, achieved his goal. But he must now pay the price in the form of being the world's only head of state facing possible genocide charges.